Document 33: Rosemary Radford Ruether, Excerpt from "Introduction," Women-Church: Theology and Practice of Feminist Liturgical Communities (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985), pp. 4-5, by Rosemary Radford Ruether. Included in How Did Catholic Women Participate in the Rebirth of American Feminism?, by Mary Henold. (Binghamton, NY: State University of New York at Binghamton, 2005).

Introduction

Many Catholic feminists valued the spirituality and support they nurtured in all-female
communities on the church's "margins." In 1983 Women-Church Convergence
was formed, a loose affiliation of grass-roots "Women-Church" cell groups across the
country designed to support women's explorations of identity and expressions of feminist
spirituality through the creation of liturgy. Rosemary Radford Ruether analyzed this
phenomenon in 1985, concluding that women had been stunted by patriarchy and starved
of meaningful spirituality for long enough. Whether or not women were to continue to
work for church renewal, they needed alternate communities where they could put their
theories into practice and "begin to live the new humanity now."

p. 4

This book is also written out of a recognition that Christian
feminists cannot wait for the institutional churches to reform
themselves enough to provide the vehicles of faith and worship
that women need in this time. Some Protestant churches have
ordained women, but, for the most part, women pastors in these
churches find themselves confined to traditional institutional
maintenance or, at best, able to take tiny steps toward new symbols
and rituals against the determined opposition of most church
members.

Roman Catholic women watch their church organizing for a
long fight against the ordination of women. The church has
launched a drive to repress efforts to incorporate feminist consciousness
into the church that have taken place in renewed religious
orders, seminaries, departments of theology at Catholic
schools, and in peace and justice centers.3 Thus, while not necessarily
repudiating all concern for renewal of existing church institutions
or continued membership in such churches (this topic will
be discussed in greater depth later), Catholic women especially,
but also a growing number of Protestant women, are beginning to
recognize the need for autonomous bases for women's theologizing
and worship.

Women in contemporary churches are suffering from linguistic
deprivation and eucharistic famine. They can no longer nurture
their souls in alienating words that ignore or systematically deny
their existence. They are starved for the words of life, for symbolic
forms that fully and wholeheartedly affirm their personhood and

p. 5

speak truth about the evils of sexism and the possibilities of a
future beyond patriarchy. They desperately need primary communities
that nurture their journey into wholeness, rather than
constantly negating and thwarting it. This book takes steps to end
that famine of the words of life and to begin to bake the new bread
of life now. We must do more than protest against the old. We
must begin to live the new humanity now. We must begin to
incarnate the community of faith in the liberation of humanity
from patriarchy in words and deed, in new words, new prayers,
new symbols, and new praxis. This means that we need to form
gathered communities to support us as we set out on our exodus
from patriarchy.

The call for new communities of faith and ritual assumes that
existing institutional churches do not have a monopoly on the
words of truth or the power of salvation, indeed that their words
for women are so ambivalent, their power so negative, that attendance
at their fonts poisons our souls. They have become all too
often occasions of sin rather than redemption, places where we
leave angry and frustrated rather than enlightened and healed. We
do not form new communities lightly, but only because the crisis
has grown so acute and the efforts to effect change so unpromising
that we often cannot even continue to communicate within these
traditional church institutions unless we have an alternative community
of reference that nurtures and supports our being.